Breaking: CPS Set to Vote on Accelerated Placement This Wednesday.

June 24, 2019 irene gottlieb

CPS Accelerated Placement Final Draft that will be voted on in the Wednesday, June 26th meeting is now available for reading here via a great Chalkbeat article. It is a part of the broader Board agenda found here, on page 75. We may update this by the end of the day today with more info.

Speaker windows were gone within the first 3 minutes, though there may be some observer slots still available. Coming early on the 26th to the board meeting will still give folks a possibility to register to speak or observe. There is still room for advocacy.

Brief analysis of how this policy is different from the previous draft, seen here:

Gains (Great job to CPS for listening to constituents at the forums and adding these to the policy, and to all the advocates that came out to speak at the forums on this policy:

· No restriction on school type– selective enrollment school students seem to be able to skip grades same as everyone else, in accordance to the state law.

· Early K entrance: must be 5 by December 31 as opposed to October 31. IQ requirement dropped to 91%, which means that now 2,000-2,000 children will be eligible this year.

· Only 2 consecutive NWEA MAP tests are required, as opposed to 3 in the original draft, still at 95% or higher performance.

· GPA requirement dropped to 3.75 as opposed to 4 in the previous draft for whole grade acceleration.

· Written plan for each student for acceleration. This may be the closest to date to a GIEP (gifted IEP) that we can get to. It still doesn’t put gifted under special ed services and keeps it separate from IEP/504, but it’s a good step forward to have this documentation.

Disappointments:

· No whole grade acceleration outside of grades 3-6

· No single subject acceleration outside of grades 3-7

· No multiple year skips unless that’s under the control of the CEO/Designee

· No NWEA norms at school/local level as opposed to at district/national level

· No appeals and application process details.

· Nothing for kids new to CPS from outside the district

Missing or seems unclear:

· There is mention of the Accelerated Placement Guidelines which are not going to be voted on in the document. In it, the use of the Iowa Acceleration scale and the rubric would be shown. It is not clear what will be adapted there.

· In the old policy draft there was mention about schools that do grouping being exempt from accelerating students, but there is nothing about how much, in terms of adequate levels of differentiation is there per grouping.

· The CEO/Designee is able to make policy changes extraneous to a board voting process.

· No considerations of other policies that need to be modified to make room for this one.

· No protections for students when a principal says that they can’t accommodate walking up, or a guideline for decision making about non-core classes that may be missed.

· No proper placement at level by testing, just a flat, one time skip.

· No above grade assessment in any subject that’s routinely administered on top of the NWEA adapted by district, such as PSAT or SAT/subject level testing, or other testing tools for proper placement.

· Still no universal screen.

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